


The Evidence of Things Not Seen

by chaila



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-25
Updated: 2009-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-11 13:03:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaila/pseuds/chaila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Why are you here, James?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Evidence of Things Not Seen

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://chaila43.livejournal.com/66246.html) on LJ.

It’s past midnight and James Ellison is driving north out of town after yet another fruitless search of yet another minor technology start-up that may or may not have ever done business with Cyberdyne or the Kaliba Group.  Weaver’s meticulously unhelpful records mention hundreds of such companies.  Sometimes he suspects that Sarah sends him on these wild goose chases on purpose.

It’s been a long four months since John Connor and whatever had been posing as Catherine Weaver had disappeared to who knows where—who knows when, he constantly reminds himself.   Most of that day itself is indistinct, an aggravation to his normally impeccable memory.  Everything blurs—the explosion of the crash, the glint of liquid metal, the glare of electric blue—and he can call up no specific moment to examine from all angles as he wants to.  The only still image he has of the day is Sarah watching the spot where her son had been, pale and motionless.  Her face in his mind reveals nothing.  

He vaguely remembers pushing her out the door afterwards, making assurances about his ability to handle it, the first of many arguments about how to handle it.  Not that she had much choice. He stayed and played the part of the confused bystander, which required very little acting.  His name had shown up in connection with hers a few times too many for his words to have much credibility on their own, but physical evidence doesn’t lie.  He'd been an exceptional agent.  He knew precisely how to arrange empirical proof to ensure that the inferences could be followed to their most logical conclusion.  They’re not trained to consider the impossible, even if it’s happened before.

When he finished answering questions, the evidence—a car in the parking lot with her blood in it, a couple of woozy guards who saw them run in but not out, a half-decimated building, a thoroughly burned out basement he doesn’t feel guilty for helping along—was as conclusive as it had been the last time she died, and Catherine Weaver, Sarah Connor, John Connor and a female associate were presumed dead.  Again.  There was a newly suspicious detective, but he was happy to let someone else chase the wisps of Sarah Connor's ghost.

She showed up at his house a few hours later, coming defiantly with the dark, clearly on her guard and with more than a few choice words about his methods.  She was even less pleased by his obvious ignorance of Weaver's long-term plans.  He suggested she leave town for awhile.  She suggested he go to hell.  He was sure she would have hit him had other things not taken priority. She wasn't convinced of Savannah’s safety and she wanted access to ZeiraCorp’s files.  She needed him. He knew a lot more about Weaver than Sarah, though as she constantly reminded him—both implicitly and out loud—not as much as he should have.  Not as much as he thought. 

For the next several weeks, she flitted in and out of his life at random, never explaining, never staying for more than an hour or two, never paying him back for the information he gave with any information of her own.  He kept expecting to find that he had outlived his usefulness, to blink and find her gone.  To be set adrift again.  Apparently she was not willing to leave Savannah Weaver or ZeiraCorp solely in his hands.  

Weaver left her controlling shares in ZeiraCorp to Savannah in trust.  He was named trustee and Savannah’s legal guardian.  He was unnerved.  Sarah was suspicious.  Apart from the flutter of in-house gossip about the extent of his involvement with Catherine Weaver, everyone else was remarkably unconcerned.  Weaver had a loyal staff and outside interest in a corporation whose assets were half ash was not high.  He still leaves the day-to-day business to those who were persuaded to stay and rebuild.  Few suspect how hard he’s worked to learn to control the corporation.

It’s a particularly clear night and the glow of the city behind him is bright in his mirrors as he drives. It’s a familiar sight. Sometimes in his dreams now the lights are fire.  

He pulls off the main highway onto the first of the minor roads that will take him to the house, checking to ensure he isn’t being followed.  They have little chance of destroying metal if it comes; their goal is to keep moving often enough to evade it.  They haven’t seen a machine in four months.  He doesn’t know whether that means their evasions have been successful or whether that means the other side believes the game has already been won.

He understands both more and less now than he did with Weaver.  At least Weaver gave him the illusion that he had it figured out for himself, a manipulation he could only see in retrospect.  Sarah offers him no such indulgence.  It’s harder now, with her, knowing just how much they don’t know. She still believes the relevant questions were answered when they’d stood next to the grave of the robot who’d resurrected itself to kill her son.  “There’s nothing else behind the curtain,” she’d said and meant it, as if proof that the machines existed answered all his questions.  As if the thing at their feet had not left him alive and followed him around for weeks in search of her.  As if it hadn’t said that he would end up back at Sarah.  As if it hadn’t been right.

The roads out here, never exactly bustling with traffic, are completely empty at this time of night.  He checks again for a tail as he turns off onto the last desert road.

For nearly a decade, he had sifted through every tape, picture and file for clues about what really happened.  He couldn't have lost a marriage, a career, a life, if there wasn't more.  Now that he is close enough to smell and touch and taste her, he had expected it all to be easier.  Clearer.  (Gun powder and steel, that’s what she smells and feels like.  He imagines gun powder and steel probably taste like Sarah too. Cold, except when sparked. Metallic.)  Instead, most of the time he feels like he's still groping around after her in the dark.  They lack Cameron, they lack John’s computer expertise.  Right now, Skynet could be any hack with a laptop.

Sarah appears to display none of the aimlessness he feels. She pursues all possible leads with a single-minded devotion that he recognizes from his years chasing a madwoman convinced that machines were going to destroy the world.  He often wonders whether anything has changed since then.  He believes her now, of course, has half-believed her for longer than she knows, but it would be going too far to say that he no longer thinks she’s crazy.  

He finally pulls down the long drive.  The house is dark; apparently they’ve had a quiet night as well. Though his definition of “quiet” usually differs sharply from Sarah’s. It’s a constant point of contention.

After weeks of her disappearing act, the last time she moved she let him in on her plans.  It would be best, she said, almost smiling, not to leave him to his own devices.  They fought for days about the location.  He tried to lobby for something even further away.  Preferably Mexico for awhile. He would take an extended vacation, they could take time, make plans.  “It always gets built here” had been her sole point in favor of staying near the city.  He hadn’t really known how to argue with inevitability.

She moved as far from the city as she was willing. He stopped worrying when he left that she would be gone when he returned.  He went to work and kept a low profile, gaining a reputation as an intensely private man.  Savannah went to school.  After that, nobody seemed to notice where they lived or with whom.  A couple of weeks after she moved in, he'd mostly given up the pretense of living somewhere else.  The pretense had been for her benefit; he knows very well that he has no home now but that which she’ll give him.  The house is small. He slept on the couch.  It had taken seven nights for her to sleep when he didn't.  Sarah radiates a kind of tense awareness when she’s awake.  Sometimes he still can't sleep for the noise of it.    

He steps inside and resets the alarms before looking in on Savannah. The night terrors are much rarer now, for which they are both grateful.  He finds it difficult to offer false comfort, even to a six-year-old, and Sarah’s forte is certainly not making nightmares go away.

The couch feels long behind them as he eases the door to Sarah’s bedroom open, trying to be quiet.  There's really no point.  The slightest movement in a room wakes her.  He does this now, comes to her bed without sex first, the most recent unspoken change between them.   She is watching him as he slips into bed.  It is clear to her that he has nothing to report.  She is not surprised.  He wants to ask what they did tonight, but he knows better.

It is in the moments of quiet, when nobody is running, when there is sleep in her eyes and the smell of shampoo in her hair, that it is hardest to bite back the questions.  About the future and about the past—which, it turns out, might be the same thing.  But these are also the only times she is still, fists unfurled and jaw unclenched. He hates to disturb it. 

Besides, years of chasing Sarah have taught him that he’s much more likely to find the answers he wants when he looks for himself.  He runs a hand down her arm and says nothing. 

He does this now too, reads her skin with his fingertips, for clues about places she's been but doesn't talk about, for stories she will probably never tell him.  She thinks all the stories are the same—they came, we ran.  The only story she cares about is the one she’s trying to write herself.  But he is a man practiced in the art of reading about Sarah.  In a few weeks, he has mapped her skin like the files he pored over so long that he can still see them with his eyes closed.  He reads for answers and for direction.  Like the Bible he studies just as closely, he thinks, and doesn’t consider it blasphemy.

He has partially heard the story of the wound on her thigh that had still been pink and tender the first time she allowed him in her bed—nearly three months after John and Weaver disappeared, and shortly after the second time he saw Sarah Connor cry.  She hadn't expected him back for another couple of hours. His incessant arguments in favor of normality won for once and Savannah was at a birthday sleepover. He found her resting on the couch, head thrown back, eyes closed, crying.  Not the racking exhausted sobs he heard as he walked away in Mexico—the ones he couldn’t begin to comprehend—but quieter, tamer tears.  He felt the same unsettled ache he felt the first time.

“Sarah,” he said, coming to sit beside her.  Her eyes flew open, irritated, but she made no move to leave. “What is it?”

She laughed, ruefully and without amusement.  She had a point. He was not dissuaded, watching her patiently until she turned to look at him without attempting an answer to his question.  “Sarah,” he tried again, more quietly.  “Let me. . . “ he trailed off.

"Let you help?" she filled in for him, with only slight hostility.

“Yes.”

“Why? Why are you here, James?”  She rarely uses his first name. It always sounds strangely intimate, even with the hint of steel that had crept into her voice.

He paused.  They don’t talk about this. “It’s evil, Sarah.  They’re evil.  Maybe not all of them, I don’t know.  But those things…they’re evil.”

“What if they win?"  she shot back. "What if they always win?”

This time he didn't pause.  “I can’t believe that."

She held his stare.  She sighed and closed her eyes again.  “Okay,” she breathed.  “Okay.” After a moment, she leaned forward and cupped his face, surprising him.  “I can’t believe that either,” she said, and kissed him.

He kissed her back, knocked slightly off balance and tentatively following her lead.  She said his name again then and he hadn’t been able to keep his hands still. He had never really pictured this; at the same time, she was exactly like he imagined she would be.

“Gunshot,” was all she offered as he uncovered the bandage on her thigh with a questioning glance.  “It’s fine.”

“Who shot you?” he asked, but she only shook her head.

When she let him remove the bandage, he traced the nearly-healed wound gently with his fingers and later with his lips; by her reaction he could tell there was more to the tale.   She had volunteered no details then or since.   He deliberately traces it again now.  He has a matching deep puncture scar on his thigh. She has never asked him about it. She says nothing now, used to his contemplation.  At least, he thinks, if she still doesn’t tell him the whole truth, he is confident that she no longer tells him lies. 

None of her wounds have healed cleanly.  There's a scar from a bullet in her arm, pink and puckered, below what he guesses is an old stab wound that makes him wince, and a much less precise scar in her side that he can tell was rather recently gaping and garish.  Now he absently slides her tank top up and bends to trace the reminder of this wound beneath her ribs with his lips, as if that might tell him something about what he's doing here, what purpose he has in the life of this woman who has always been everywhere he turned, proving incomprehensible truths yet revealing so little.

She sighs in the dark as her fingers come up to rest lightly on the back of his neck.  He is a tactile person but she is not; she touches him for emphasis, never absently. 

“It wanted me to call out to John," she says quietly. 

He hesitates.  “It?”

“Cameron.”

It takes a long minute for that word to register and he looks up and into her face, open and pained, and it is something like the revelation he wants. “Blood and water,” he murmurs, a breath against her ribs, as he brushes away a tear on her cheek. She watches him back silently, brow slightly furrowed, before she brushes the palm of her hand along his jaw and turns away. There are still limits to her honesty, when it comes.  

He nods, bows his head against her side. It’s enough.

 

 


End file.
